HEINZ ENDOWMENTS Group funds drilling foes and backers

In the fierce debates over the safety of fracking for natural gas, one group is giving both sides a chance to make their points.

Pittsburgh’s Heinz Endowments is funding groups that say fracking can’t ever be done safely. It is also working with major energy companies and environmentalists who believe the drilling can be done without hurting the environment or public health.

“The Endowments actually tries to encourage the democratic principle of airing various [and sometimes opposing] points of view on complicated and important issues,” Heinz spokesman Doug Root wrote in an email. That includes funding “different approaches to advocacy on environmental issues” because at any point in time one approach may be more effective than another.

Heinz doesn’t have a problem with the diverse views, but over the past two months dozens of environmental groups have criticized a new initiative the Endowments helped found— the Pittsburgh-based Center for Sustainable Shale Development. That’s a partnership between energy companies, including Shell and Chevron, and national and regional environmental groups. In announcing the effort, Heinz Endowments president Robert Vagt said he believes fracking “can be done in a way that does not do violence to the environment.”

One anti-fracking group that received funding last year from the Heinz Endowments, which is separate from the food company, said it doesn’t approve of the Sustainable Shale effort.

“Yes, we absolutely raised serious concerns” with the Endowments, said Barbara Arrindell, director of Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, a New York-based group. She said she asked Heinz “where you’re going with this.”

Arrindell called the Sustainable Shale effort “terribly silly” and a “distraction” from efforts to examine health and environmental impacts from fracking, but said she recognizes that the Endowments, like other large organizations, contains people with different views.

Others note that some criticism of the Sustainable Shale project uses a selective brush, attacking the energy companies and certain environmental groups for working with them — but not the Heinz Endowments.

The Endowments has given out more than $10 million in gas drilling-related grants over the past three years. Many of the grant recipients have criticized the industry.

The Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group, said it’s heartening that the Heinz Endowments and some others “are finally acknowledging these clear environmental and economic benefits” of the drilling boom.